The primary purpose of the Internet today, and for the foreseeable future, is carrying content from sources to consumers. The volume of traffic is often more than a single content source host can handle and mechanisms have been developed that spread load by making multiple servers look like one end point or by replicating data at multiple sites and redirecting sessions. Because an IP network is architecturally designed for point-to-point connections between specific addresses, these mechanisms are unwieldy and require changing the operation of basic mechanisms such as the domain name service (DNS) that returns an IP address for a given name.
When the same content is required by many consumers, the IP network does not spontaneously create a multi-cast situation. Multi-cast is emulated by caching information at many points and the choice of what gets cached is based on a guess at future requests or observations of previous transactions.
AN IP network is optimized for delivery of packets from one end point address to another. A future network should be designed to carry content from sources to consumers and to naturally facilitate replication and multi-cast. End-to-end connections should be a small subset of overall network function.
With the advent of very high speed networks, the granularity of information transfer can be much less (bigger chunks) than the IP packet. The larger payload permits much larger “headers”. The use of a large header permits the breaking away from the address oriented model where the header is used to route the data to a known end-point.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to provide a technique for delivering content which overcomes the above-described inadequacies and shortcomings. More particularly, it would be desirable to provide a technique for delivering content over a network in an efficient and cost effective manner.